The Hampstead Mystery eBook

“Yes,” was the reply. “I followed
out your plan—­it worked without a hitch.”

“Ah, I knew you would manage it,” said
the girl. “I would have gone, but it was
best that you should go. These police agents do
not like foreigners—­they would be suspicious
if I had gone.”

“There was a big red-faced man in charge—­Inspector
Chippenfield, they called him,” said Mrs. Holymead.
“He was in the library as you said he would
be—­he was sitting there calmly as if he
did not know what nerves were. He knew me as
a friend of the family and was quite nice to me.
I saw as soon as I went in that the desk was open—­he
had been examining Sir Horace’s private papers.
I asked him to tell me about the—­about the
tragedy. He piled horror on horror and then I
pretended to faint. He ran down stairs for a
glass of water, and that gave me time to open the
secret drawer. They are here,” she added,
patting the hand-bag affectionately; “let us
go upstairs and burn them.”

CHAPTER VI

There was unpleasant news for Inspector Chippenfield
when Miss Fewbanks arrived at Riversbrook accompanied
by the housekeeper, Mrs. Hewson. In the first
place, he learnt with considerable astonishment that
it was Miss Fewbanks’s intention to stay at
the house until after the funeral, and for that purpose
she had brought the housekeeper to keep her company
in the lonely old place. Although they had taken
up their quarters in the opposite wing of the rambling
mansion to that in which the dead body lay, it seemed
to Inspector Chippenfield—­whose mind was
very impressionable where the fair sex was concerned—­that
Miss Fewbanks must be a very peculiar girl to contemplate
staying in the same house with the body of her murdered
father for nearly a week. He was convinced that
she must be a strong-minded young woman, and he did
not like strong-minded young women. He preferred
the weak and clinging type of the sex as more of a
compliment to his own sturdy manliness.

His unfavourable impression of Miss Fewbanks was deepened
when he saw her and heard what she had to tell him.
The girl had come up from the country filled with
horror at the crime which had deprived her of a father,
and firmly determined to leave no stone unturned to
bring the murderer to justice. It was true that
she and her father had lived on terms of partial estrangement
for some time past because of his manner of life,
but all the girl’s feelings of resentment against
him had been swept away by the news of his dreadful
death, and all she remembered now was that he was
her father, and had been brutally murdered.

When she sent for Inspector Chippenfield she had visited
the room in which lay the body of her father.
It had been placed in a coffin which was resting on
the undertaker’s trestles in the bay embrasure
of the big room with the folding doors. There
was nothing in the appearance of the corpse to suggest
that a crime had been committed, but it had been impossible
for the undertaker’s men to erase entirely the
distortion of the features so that they might suggest
the cold, calm dignity of a peaceful death. The
ordeal of looking on the dead body of her father had
nerved her to carry through resolutely the task of
discovering the author of the crime.